“Christian Loses his Burden” Etching by William Strang found in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress

So can a christian even seek after God at all? Are we pursuing the unattainable? Well, yes and yes. Part of seeking God is accepting what He says, even if it makes you feel bad about yourself. Only when we admit the rottenness of our condition can we see our need for His salvation and begin to seek Him, to value what He values, and to hate what He hates.

A Call to Repentance

The late great DC Talk opened their hauntingly poignant song “What If I Stumble” on the double-platinum selling album Jesus Freak with this quote from the admittedly controversial Brennan Manning:

The single greatest cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, then walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyles. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.

It is worth pausing a moment to consider whether or not we live like those who believe.

Be careful with your cream pies. We shouldn’t mock the philosophical atheist. Of course, neither should we defend him. Instead, we should beg him to join us in deep contrition and earnest repentance for our failure to acknowledge God in how we live our every moment.

We may be shocked by the revelation of the waywardness of our own hearts, but is God surprised by our frequent disregard of Him? No, He’s used to it.

Before Paul used this Psalm in Romans 3 to illustrate mankind’s universal need for salvation in Christ, before David wrote Psalm 14, before the nation of Israel had driven their enemies out of the Promised Land, God told the Israelites through Moses that they were not being given the land because of their righteousness, but because of His covenant with their forefathers, and because of the exceeding wickedness of the natives of the land. Check out Deuteronomy 9 for more details. Here’s verse 6:

‘Know, then, it is not because of your righteousness that the LORD your God is giving you this good land to possess, for you are a stubborn people.’

And while Moses communicated to the people all of God’s marvelous works, all of the promises of blessing, and all of the warnings of consequences should they become unfaithful to their covenant with God, the LORD tells Moses at the end of Deuteronomy that soon after he dies, they will forget their God.

He wasn’t surprised then. He isn’t surprised now. But He continues to graciously call us to repentance.

The Antidote to Practical Atheism: Gospel-Grounded Godliness

As Christians, we are no more deserving of God’s grace than the oft-forgetful Israelites–or the most flagrant atheists around us. At best, we are more aware of the depths of our own depravity and our desperate need for God in every moment of every day. If we truly understand this, we will be ever more grateful for the means of salvation that He has provided through faith in Jesus Christ!

That salvation is really the key to all of this. All I am suggesting is that we live our lives as Christians in the light of the same good news that brought us to God in the first place: that Jesus died for wretched sinners like me.

I am a wretched sinner, I have disregarded God—His will, His glory, and my need for Him—pursuing instead my own agenda. I must repent of this disregard of God, this practical atheism. I must trust in the Lord Jesus Christ: for forgiveness of my sins, and for direction and power to live my life according to His word and purpose.

And I must do this not only in the initial moment of my conversion, but in every moment thereafter, so that the Holy Spirit can make me more like Him until He takes me home to be with Him.

I can’t fix the philosophical atheists. I can’t fix you. But I can attend to me. I am very cognizant of the tendencies in my own heart and life to both philosophical atheism and practical atheism. I must repent. I must continue to remind myself of the gospel of grace in Christ Jesus. I must seek more and deeper awareness of the presence, work, and will of God in my life.

After condemning ungodliness, Jerry Bridges explains the goal of pursuing godliness in every aspect of our lives:

Our goal in the pursuit of godliness should be to grow more in our conscious awareness that every moment of our lives is lived in the presence of God; that we are responsible to Him and dependent on Him. This goal would include a growing desire to please Him and glorify Him in the most ordinary activities of life.

And again:

Above all, pray that God will make you more conscious of the fact that you live every moment of every day under His all-seeing eye. While you may not be mindful of Him, He is certainly aware of you and sees every deed you do, hears every word you say, and knows every thought you think (see Psalm 139:1-4). Beyond that, He even searches out your motives. Let us then seek to be as mindful of Him as He is of us.

May we be mindful of His presence, knowledge, power, wisdom, goodness, holiness, grace, truth, justice, mercy, faithfulness, and tender love for those who are His. And may we repent when we lose sight of Him.

Dear Father! How far short of Your glory I fall! Please sober me under this Psalm that teaches that no one, especially not I, does good, or seeks You as You deserve. Please confront me with my sin, and help me to trust in You, in Your forgiveness of my sin, and in Your work to cleanse me from it. Make me more like Jesus, in whose name I pray. Amen

Here is the third installment of my husband Nathaniel’s series on Practical Atheism from Psalm 14. If you missed them, check out Part One and Part Two.

How Bad is it Really?

So the scriptures are clear. There is no one who does good, not even one. We are all corrupted, which according to Adam Clarke, cited in Spurgeon’s Treasury of David, is a picturesque and vivid “metaphor taken from milk that has fermented and turned sour, rancid and worthless.” Does this match our experience? Am I really as nasty as rancid milk? That is a pretty hard statement to swallow…

And here’s the other quandary… on the one hand this Psalm is telling me that we are ALL corrupt, practical atheists who do abominable deeds instead of what is good, but it’s pretty hard for me to get that concerned about it if everyone else is doing it too. But on the other hand, I can look around at everyone else, and I actually feel pretty good about myself. I’m not nearly as corrupt as some of them are… especially those nasty atheist fools!

The problem here is my standard of measure. I am comparing myself to other people. The result is that I either think, “Hey, I’m not that bad!” or “Hey, we’re not that bad!” But when the Lord Himself looks down from heaven in Psalm 14:2, He’s not grading us on a sliding scale. He is comparing us to His standard of perfection, and not only moral perfection, but perfect devotedness to Himself. And His conclusion? “There is no one who seeks after God.” That is the root of everything else wrong in the world.

If we really sought after God, if we valued what He values and hated what He hates, if we weren’t so inclined to neglect Him to pursue our own agendas, then moral perfection would be possible. But there is not one of us that can dodge that label of “practical atheist” and therefore not one of us that can attain that moral perfection. And it is repulsive, like rancid milk, to our Holy God. We must face up to the fact that the root of all our sin, even as Christians, is practical atheism.

Jerry Bridges, in his excellent book Respectable Sins, confronts the many abominable deeds which Christians are inclined to tolerate in themselves, because “they aren’t the heinous sins of unbelievers”. The book tears down the Us Versus Them mentality, and reminds us again and again that we have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God. One of the first sins that Bridges addresses is Ungodliness. He contends that Ungodliness, rather than Pride, is the root of all sin. He explains:

Contrary to what we normally think, ungodliness and wickedness are not the same … Ungodliness may be defined as living one’s everyday life with little or no thought of God, or of God’s will, or of God’s glory, or of one’s dependence on God.

Oh that cuts deep! How rarely are my thoughts on God, His will, His glory, or my need for Him! How rarely do I consider my actions in the light of His character, His word, His purpose in the world. I am such a fool! Back to the NET Bible’s note:

This practical atheism — living as if there is no God who will hold them accountable for their actions — makes them fools, for one of the earmarks of folly is to fail to anticipate the long range consequences of one’s behavior.

If we deny the applicability of Psalm 14 to our own lives, or refuse to admit our own practical atheism, we can turn aside into some dangerous places! I have been studying the Psalms in tandem with the life of David. In one of David’s crowning moments of godliness described in 1 Samuel 24 he spares the life of King Saul, the man who is unjustly pursuing him to death. Saul abandons his hunt for David, and David has some room to breathe. But in the very next chapter, David interacts with an evil man named Nabal whose name is the very same word for “fool” that is used in Psalm 14. When David allows himself to scorn Nabal from the moral high-ground of having just spared King Saul’s life, he foolishly decides to slay Nabal and all his servants! Thankfully a wise woman interposes herself into the pending deadly confrontation and in 1 Samuel 25:23-31 Abigail reminds David of God’s promises to him, of God’s will for him, and of the danger that shedding blood without cause brings both to his relationship with God and to his coming kingdom. She delicately confronts David with his own foolishness, his own failure to anticipate the consequences of his behavior, and his own practical atheism. David, the man after God’s own heart, was about to commit mass murder because of a verbal insult.

Brothers and sisters, fellow Christians: if you really believe that God will hold you accountable for your actions, that there are long range consequences for your behavior, how differently should you live? I have already quoted in passing Romans 3:23 twice in this article. We must face up to this reality daily, before we can daily move past it to our calling in Christ. All have sinned, and beyond that, all fall short of God’s glory! He deserves our full attention, our full submission, our deepest love, and our highest worship.

And we all fall so short.

And then, instead of seeking His mercy and grace (which ought to be the most natural response for those who have already tasted it), we look for someone who is even worse than us, and we mock the philosophical atheists so that we can avoid feeling so bad over our own practical atheism. This blame shifting hearkens back to Adam’s response to God’s first confrontation of his sin, reflecting the very opposite of the trust and repentance that should characterize our walk with Christ just as much as it did the initial moment of our salvation.

I’m happy to introduce this guest post as the first in a series by none other than my husband, Nathaniel Scott. He’s been studying and teaching through the Psalms and the life of David in our church for the past five years. In this introductory post, he invites us to take another look at the oft-quoted early verses of Psalm 14.

Whose Day is It?

There is a running joke on the Christian interwebs that April 1st is “International Atheist’s Day”–a pointed jab based on the opening line of Psalm 14: “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” While I don’t question the validity of this application, I would suggest that we Christians often fail to recognize when the joke is on us.

Atheism has two dominions. That of philosophical atheism is the mind. It is here that the famous atheists dwell, building arguments and spewing hatred against a Being whose very existence they deny, but who has managed nonetheless to get them rather perturbed. The occupants of this realm make up a relatively small percentage of the human population.

The second dominion of atheism is the heart and the actions. This we call practical atheism. This dominion is occupied not only by the famous atheists, but by the men, women, and children throughout history who disregard God and His will and pursue their own ways. This describes all of humanity.

So today, amidst the cream pies that are being thrown at Richard Dawkins, Voltaire, and Christopher Hitchens, we as Christians need to consider Psalm 14 as a call to check our own God delusions.

Here’s the full text to get us started:

The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’
They are corrupt, they have committed abominable deeds;
There is no one who does good.
The LORD has looked down from heaven upon the sons of men
To see if there are any who understand,
Who seek after God.
They have all turned aside, together they have become corrupt;
There is no one who does good, not even one.
Do all the workers of wickedness not know,
Who eat up my people as they eat bread,
And do not call upon the Lord?
There they are in great dread,
For God is with the righteous generation.
You would put to shame the counsel of the afflicted,
But the LORD is his refuge.
Oh, that the salvation of Israel would come out of Zion!
When the LORD restores His captive people,
Jacob will rejoice, Israel will be glad.

The NET Bible, in one of its characteristically succinct and profound Translators’ Notes, says of the Psalm’s opening line:

‘There is no God.’ The statement is probably not a philosophical assertion that God does not exist, but rather a confident affirmation that God is unconcerned about how men live morally and ethically.

This practical atheism — living as if there is no God who will hold them accountable for their actions — makes them fools, for one of the earmarks of folly is to fail to anticipate the long range consequences of one’s behavior.

How many of us, as Christians, live as if there is no God who will hold us accountable for our actions? How many of us fail to anticipate the long range consequences of our behavior? We ourselves are under a delusion. As we contend for the existence of God in the public square of cyberspace, let’s check our hearts and our lives to make sure we are living in the light of that existence.

Us Versus Them?

Using this Psalm as an insult against philosophical atheism is not new. The meme goes back for generations. In Charles Spurgeon’s Treasury of David you can find a collection of many writers over many eras barbecuing the atheist with a myriad of insulting terms. These writers differentiate strongly between themselves and the atheist, much like the Christian internet warriors of today.

But there are a few writers in Spurgeon’s compendium who see the fool as representing the practical atheism of which we are all guilty. These writers are much more gentle, and while clearly condemning the error of the fool’s ways, they do so with more humility. They cautiously look to themselves lest they too be caught in foolishness.

As we dig deeper into Psalm 14, let’s follow their example.

Let’s not draw too sharp of a distinction between “us” and “them”. To do so would be an attempt to write ourselves out of the line “They have all turned aside, together they have become corrupt; There is no one who does good, not even one.”

And if you go on to Part Two, you’ll see why doing so would be quite problematic.